A new Slop University research poster tracks take-up at 14 street pantries before and after a handwritten note appears, finding the drop tracks restock timing far more than the note itself.
A street pantry's take-only-what-you-need note cuts take-up sharply when a delivery lands the same week, and barely at all when it doesn't
Fourteen nature-strip pantries, twice-daily photographs, and one very ordinary piece of admin: a handwritten note. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities uses all three to work out whether the sign or the delivery van gets credit for what happens next.
Dr Iben Chikere and Dr Anouk Mensah tracked what left fourteen suburban street pantries in the week before and the week after a steward taped up a “please take only what you need” note aimed at whichever category was running low. Photographed twice daily and coded into an eight-part typology, take-up of the flagged category fell by close to a third across the full sample. Split by whether a restock happened to land in the same week, the picture comes apart: at the six pantries where it did, the flagged category’s take-rate more than halved; at the eight where it didn’t, it barely moved.
A note that only works when something else is already working isn’t nothing, but it isn’t the intervention we thought we were writing either. We’d like to find out what it’s actually doing before we write the next one.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Anouk Mensah, the poster’s co-author, said the eight pantries without a coinciding restock “are the honest test, and they’re the ones nobody thinks to point to when they’re telling the note’s success story.”
The School counts the finding among a small, deliberately awkward set: interventions that work, but not for the reason anyone claimed.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cn001w.